by Marion Winik
The Maid
IT’S EASY to look down on men who pay women to be nice to them, but I believe I had a similar relationship with the lady who came to clean my house on Wednesdays. A big, bosomy, brown-eyed, strawberry blond in a Garfield T-shirt that read “Domestic Goddess, ” her greatest loves were Jesus and her cat, yet she had a startlingly dry wit and broad mind. And a grown daughter somewhere, an ailing, difficult mother, some bitchy neighbors in the trailer park who complained about her blow-up pool. We talked about these things, and also about how I should switch the rugs in my living room, and she convinced me to buy a dehumidifier for the basement on eBay. All for $16 an hour. When she fell out with another of “her girls, ” as she called her cleaning clients, over a broken knickknack, I experienced a little moment of sibling victory.
She drove an old white Cadillac that couldn’t make it up our driveway in the winter. We begged her to park it at the end and we’d ferry her in the SUV, but driving on the icy hills was terrifying to her—she’d rather walk a quarter mile through the snow in her little white sandals. One day she told me she felt like she was part man inside. I told her I felt just the same way. Then right around Christmas last year, she suddenly started showing up with two helpers. They’d clean the house and she’d sit out in the Caddy. I begged her to come in for a cup of tea. Next time, the helpers showed up alone. Oh, didn’t you hear? No, and I could hardly believe she’d had some horrible cancer for which she’d refused treatment and that she’d died alone in that trailer. Since last goddamn week! Didn’t she know I would have come in a minute?
The Sikh
IF A PARENT’S NUMBER one worry is that something will happen to her child, number two is: something will happen to me. I will have to leave them when they still need me. Before my work is done. Before I see how they turn out. But in this area, as in so many others, we are not in charge.
The first time I met the big, gruff American man with the turban and the bushy beard, he was working alongside my sister in a small appliance repair shop in the 1970s. Ten years later, I ran into him again, working alongside my friend in the natural foods business. Another few years, and I met his amazing ninety-pound wife: my yoga teacher, then my midwife. By then I had gotten over the fact that they wore those funny outfits and were both called Gurubachan. I was in love with their four children, two sons and two daughters who had Indian names (not, thankfully, Gurubachan). But it took some time to find out their story.
At nineteen, the girl who would become Mrs. G.B. had fled a bad scene in Chicago with her newborn daughter. She wound up in an ashram in Tucson where she found Mr. G.B., a recent college dropout from Baltimore, teaching yoga. By the time her baby turned one they were Sikhs, and they were married. They moved to Topeka, Kansas City, Dallas, and finally to Austin with their growing brood. He was a roofer, a cook, a salesman; she taught knitting and delivered babies; they believed in a life of the spirit and tried to live it every day.
He got a perfect math score on his SAT, their oldest daughter recently wrote me. He got up every morning at 4 a.m. to meditate and then work on his list, one long, perpetual list of things to do, in a ratty spiral notebook. He once put a down payment on a car with change he had snagged from all of our pockets doing laundry over the course of a year. He didn’t cut his hair for 30 years except for the part they had to shave for his brain surgery. The last thing he said to me was, I wish I got there in time to be your birth father.
She was in her twenties, a mother herself, when multiple sclerosis took his mobility, his serenity, his math skills, his breadwinning, his fatherhood. The ratty notebook was abandoned, empty pages curled, fading items unchecked. Yet he had done what he set out to do.
The Nurse
MY SON HAD a friend, a redheaded wraith on a skateboard, who lived with his mother and grandparents. All had the same translucent skin, horsey jaw, and brown dot eyes, and all were medicated beyond belief: the boy for ADHD and oppositional defiance disorder; the older generation for chronic pain, migraines, and depression. Ma and Grandma staggered around the house in their fuzzy pink bathrobes and curlers while Grandpa snoozed in the rocker, waking only when lured by the boy into driving him somewhere. No one said no to the boy; he was the light of their lives. They went to war with the school authorities and the neighbors, they filed suit against the local police. One day they showed up at my door with their crazy eyes and bony hands to tell me to keep my son at home, he was walking the five miles to their house in the middle of the night. My boy is on medication, Ma told me, if he drinks alcohol there will be trouble.
Well, she was right. She called me over there one night to pick up my drunken son. I don’t know when this happened, I checked their eyes earlier this evening, she said, whipping her penlight out of her pocket. She was a nurse, she explained. It would be weeks before we found out the full extent of the mayhem, and the only time I ever saw her in real clothes was when we all went to court. Afterward I took her advice and kept my boy out of there. How is your old friend? I asked my boy a year later. Oh, he said, it’s sad. His grandpa died, his grandma died, and then last month he found his mom facedown in her cereal bowl. I stared at him. Is it possible he is better off now? my son wondered. He is living with his karate teacher. It seems okay.
The VIP Lounge
THE SNIPER’S BULLET, the tunnel wall, the needle, the gas oven: death may be a great equalizer, but the afterlife is another story. If your tragic demise is a defining moment in the history of a generation—so much so that the phrase “defining moment” is invented to describe it—if the children you left behind are emblems of a society of orphans, if you have a postage stamp or are sometimes sighted on an island near the Bermuda Triangle, you will certainly spend eternity behind the velvet rope. At least there you can relax. There Jimi Hendrix looks down Princess Di’s dress as she leans over him to tell JFK a story. There Sylvia Plath takes a delicious bite out of Tupac. After Courtney Love, Janis Joplin seems like no trouble to Kurt Cobain. John and George jam with Elvis while they wait for the others. Oh good, here comes Marilyn with a bottle of champagne—if Jim Morrison doesn’t get to her first.
Nothing stops it. Not beauty, not humor, not talent, not wisdom. Not youth or health or goodness or fame or love. Not people who need us. Not a job to do. When a beautiful princess dies, everybody knows this all at once, instead of one person crying alone on a cold kitchen floor. What a pleasure it is to grieve in this vast communal way, piling teddy bears and roses at the site of the beautiful corpse, writing poems and watching programs on television for decades to come. To imagine that there is some fairy-tale sense to be made, some reason, some inevitable truth, as if our deaths come from our lives as our voices from our throats. Down the hall, Spalding Gray is telling the story of his suicide to Vincent van Gogh and Anne Frank. It is so good to see them laughing.
Even if I get by the bouncer with a smooth line and a fake ID, it’ll be just as awkward seeing them there as it was when we were all alive. Allen Ginsberg won’t recall the time I went home with him and Orlovsky after the reading and stayed for a week. Jerry Garcia won’t remember whispering Happy Birthday into the microphone during a jam at Englishtown Raceway the day I turned fifteen. But Grace Paley, who defined not a moment but a whole calendar for some passionate young women of the late twentieth century who learned to write by reading her and following her around, if she is there I know she will recognize me, will jump up, arms wide, and say Marion!
About the Author
MARION WINIK is the author of five previous books of essays and memoir, and two books of poetry. She has been a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered since 1991 and is a contributor to many magazines. She teaches at the University of Baltimore and lives in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania.
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